Advisor

Committee Member

Second Committee Member

Keywords

Abstract

The objective of this trial was to determine if varying the nutritional composition of meat and bone meal (MBM) would impact broiler performance and yield compared to diets which provide a consistent quality of MBM. Twelve hundred day-old male broilers from the Cobb 500 female line were randomly allocated to 48 pens (25 chicks/pen; 22 square feet) and grown to 49 days of age. Starter, grower, and withdrawal diets were formulated to contain MBM at 10, 7.5 and 5% respectively using the Cobb nutritional standards. Four treatments provided were: 1) H.J. Baker proprietary blend, ProPlus 57 fed continuously; 2) MBM 50 formulated diet fed continuously; 3) MBM 50 specs used for formulation but starting day 14, the MBM was rotated between MBM 45, 50 and 55 with no formulation adjustments to compensate for any nutritional differences: 4) MBM 50 specs used in formulation but replaced with MBM 45 in the actual diet. Each pen was provided feed and water ad libitum throughout the grow-out period. Birds were weighed on days 0, 14, 28, and 49 and feed consumption data was also collected for each period. Birds were processed on day 50 and live weight, pre-chill, post chill, pectoralis major and minor, wings, leg quarters, and skeletal weights were collected from individual birds. Data was analyzed using PROC GLM with dietary treatment serving as the main effect in SAS. Treatment 3 and 4 weights were lower (P=.0142) at day 49. There were no significant differences at days 0, 14, or 28. There was a significant difference in feed conversion at day 14 (P=.0397) with treatment 4 being significantly worse than treatment 2 and 3. Also at day 28 (P=0.0003), with treatment 4 being significantly higher than all other treatments. Processing results showed no significant differences in yield except for the skeletal with treatment 1 being the heaviest (P=.0352). These results suggest that while marginal variation in MBM does not influence early performance, as birds reached heavier weights, the MBM variability impacted performance. Processing results and live production results were then used to produce gross margin which treatment 1 was $0.11 to $0.14 per bird greater than any other treatment.